“Rework” The Way You Domain

There is an established way of doing things. When the business community sees something that seems to work, it is duplicated and repeated with the hopes of success. It then becomes so ingrained in the way we live our lives that we take these things as absolute truths. Society, and each of us as individuals, have burned them into our mind to the point that we don’t question them at all. We see it as our road map to success and don’t dare stray from the path. Jason Fried and David Heinermeier Hansson challenge this in their book, “Rework.”

The author, Jason Fried, founded the company 37signals, a web application company in Chicago in 1999. “Rework” has been described as a recap of company’s blog, “Signal vs. Noise.” I don’t follow the blog, so I won’t comment on the accuracy of that statement, but I did find some good information in just a quick glance at the blog.

The book is a quick read and I found the first half the most compelling. In fact, it probably could have ended there. While the information may not be entirely new, it is valuable. If it causes you to question your current strategy, it has value. Some might say it’s common sense, but if it is, then why aren’t these ideas more commonly practiced? Some of the concepts covered that seem counter intuitive to how we work include:

Learning from our mistakes is overrated. Learn from Success.

Planning is guessing. Spend less time planing and make more decisions on the fly.

Workaholics contribute less.

Finance your own operations or your decisions will be controlled by others.

Staying small can be better than growing. Don’t try to enhance your products to meet all your customers needs.

Those are just a few of my favorites and can be directly applied to the domainers. The book is well worth the read and the short time commitment to get through it. You’ll find yourself thinking about what you do and how you can do it differently. You may find that a small tweak that comes from the ideas in this book make a significant impact in the way you operate.